Fairbridgians

Under the urge of a chance adventure, and driven by pride and hunger, I found a task and dreamed a dream which held me all the days of my boyhood, and now occupies my every working hour, and will never be fulfilled even though I live the 80 and odd years that have been foretold for me.

The handsome, moody lad who had such a momentous dream was Kingsley Fairbridge, 12-year-old son of a British surveyor in Rhodesia. The year: 1897. For two days he had been camping on the veldt without food when, cresting a hill, he had a feverish vision. The veldt was transformed into fertile farms, peopled by British colonists. Some day, somehow, he resolved, he would bring those farmers to Rhodesia.

Few years later this young imperialist visited London where he saw streets and orphanages swarming with grubby, undernourished children.

Farmers--children, farmers--children. And then I saw it clearly: Train the children to be farmers! Not in England. Teach them farming in the land where they will farm.

Too earnest to share his dream, Kingsley Fairbridge told not even his father until he was 21 and ready for Oxford. One of the first Rhodes Scholars, he went in for boxing in the belief that through athletic distinction he might gain a hearing for his plan. Although dogged all his life by malaria, he won his Blue and one night in 1909 the Oxford Colonial Club gave him his hearing, endorsed his plan.

When the Rhodes-founded British South Africa Co. refused him land, he turned to Australia. There, on a capital of -L-2,000 supplied mostly by Colonial Club members, the first Fairbridge Farm School was started in 1912. In 1924 when it was firmly established on a 3,200-acre farm near Pinjarra, Kingsley Fairbridge died of malaria.

Since 1912, 1,000 British youngsters from Poor Law institutions have been sent to Pinjarra, only six returned as failures. For five years "Fairbridgians" are given a simple education, supplemented, for the boys, by husbandry, milking, horseshoeing, boxing. At the age of 14 or 15 they are hired out to farm families as apprentices, half of each Fairbridgian's wages being set aside so that at 21 he will have -L-200. Frowned on as an expensive form of emigration by the British Treasury, the School is a favorite charity of the Prince of Wales; Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin; Malcolm MacDonald, Secretary of State for Colonies; the Marquess of Linlithgow, Viceroy of India; Lady Tweedsmuir, the wife of the new Governor-General of Canada; Edward Stephen Harkness (Harvard House plan, Yale College plan); many another fashionable sponsor.

Founder Fairbridge had planned other schools--in Canada, Newfoundland, New Zealand, Rhodesia. To start a Canadian school on Vancouver Island, the Prince of Wales last year donated -L-1,000 and other sponsors swelled the fund to -L-70,000. Last week in Montreal landed the first batch of Canadian Fairbridgians, 27 boys, 14 girls, averaging ten years of age. Most of them came from around Newcastle. Solicitous Canadians found them a spruce and keen-eyed but impish lot who raced up & down the deck of their steamer, yelling, pulling one another's hair, tormenting their three chaperones. At the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School at Pemberlea, Vancouver Island, the 41 obstreperous youngsters and the 300 who are to follow them will be gently but firmly reined in by the principal, Major Maurice Francis Trew, late of His Majesty's Coldstream Guards.

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